AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“[Contemporary] sculpture insinuate[s] itself into the texture of the world. There isn’t time or distance enough to perpetuate monuments. We live in a world of half gestures where there is no definitive stance and the sands sift incessantly over a desert of evidential truth. . . . Rawness and anxiety trumps the autopsies of the acceptable and the negotiable. Sculpture is the medium that knows best how to live in the present and find the future.”

– RICHARD FLOOD 1

Robert Youds has been building For Everyone a Fountain for three years, and I suspect he will continue to work with it for years. As we prepared for the Open Space presentation, I encountered three successive iterations, each absorbing and complex, each intimately tuned to site. Mutable and transforming, For Everyone a Fountain will find unexpected places to inhabit, adapting to the places where Youds rebuilds it. As Richard Flood’s comment suggests, contemporary art—sculpture—has the capacity to settle anywhere and to renegotiate conditions of locale and site. As a serial sculpture, one could say the armature of For Everyone a Fountain is an inbuilt tensile flexibility, a purposeful unfixedness.

At Open Space, Youds augmented For Everyone a Fountain with other works: three wall-mounted light boxes and a projected text. He engineered an interdisciplinary, technology-rich, and colour-saturated Anthropocene ecosystem. Recharging the formal and quieter dimensions of art and spatiality, For Everyone a Fountain is unapologetically contemplative. Youds’ work evades easy categorization and resists a simple declarative narrative. His work embraces its visitors but doesn’t tether them. In turn, visitors navigate a radiant stage of compounding possibility. In equal measure, Youds’ work alludes to twenty-first-century anxiety, precarity, fear, and transitory communities and lives as markers of the complex conditions of late capitalism’s cultures. Performance insinuates itself throughout Youds’ project in the constantly changing algorithmic lighting, “performing” an interpretive act. In addition, Youds himself performed a voice camouflage soliloquy as a component of his artist’s talk at Open Space.

Youds uses sound and text to derail an overriding narrative. For example, the sound in For Everyone a Fountain originates in the engineered tones of the Hong Kong subway systems, amounting to a continuous composite portrait of the system’s millions of daily riders. In Victoria, this sound is abstract and its representative origins are obscure. It reminds us that invisible knowledge systems saturate our lives and environs. These systems are natural, microscopic, aural, technological, cultural, and historical. We may be affected by them or not; we do not register or internalize them; we are oblivious and unaware; and sometimes, completely preoccupied, we do not have the literacy to comprehend them. In encountering For Everyone a Fountain, we are simultaneously captivated and disoriented. Youds nudges us to think and experience perceptually and, more significantly, encourages us to prioritize this mode of engagement during the moments we inhabit his installation.

To complicate the viewer’s experience, Youds included the poetic and mischievous text projection Your best room is a glossary. Traditionally, a glossary acts as the reader’s guide, defining arcane, technical, or obscure terminology. Rather than defining, Youds’ glossary unravels and seriously messes with easy or seamless definition. His glossary feeds the perceptual imaginary rather than rational strategies of interpretation. In his installation, Youds releases us from the confines of provisional and transitory conclusions. For Everyone a Fountain invites us to live, for a time, in an elemental garden with panoramic imaginative views.

For this publication, Open Space commissioned three essays by Lisa Baldissera, Diana Freundl, and Regan Shrumm. Lisa Baldissera draws upon her long association with Robert Youds and his work to overview For Everyone a Fountain. She articulates his continuing aesthetic preoccupations, especially regarding the interplay of site and locale. Diana Freundl, who curated For Everyone a Sunset in Vancouver, focuses her analysis on urban environments, specifically the histories, surprises, and adaptations of Hong Kong’s dense urban environment. Regan Shrumm grounds her essay in ideas of idealistic structures, drawing upon the histories of Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 and Vancouver Island’s Butchart Gardens.

For Everyone a Fountain echoes many of Open Space’s founding aspirations. It evades a designated disciplinary alliance; it activates interrogative [ad]ventures and, in turn, stimulates speculative interpretation. It is approachable and rigorous; and it is borne of, and subsequently encourages, mentorship and collaboration, as well as performance, both human and algorithmic.

Open Space is honoured to present this major work by an artist of Robert Youds’ experience and stature. During the 1980s, Youds’ work was curated as part of group exhibitions at Open Space, but For Everyone a Fountain is his first solo project here. Throughout the planning, installation, and publication phases of the project, Robert Youds has been unfailingly flexible and understanding during a time of intense transition at Open Space. Youds, as you might guess, has a finely tuned sense of humour. He has been articulate and generous in assisting all of us to step beyond the threshold of For Everyone a Fountain, inviting us into “the best room we will ever know.”

There are many others to thank. Technical consultant Steven A. Bjornson built the algorithm supporting the interpretation of four photographs—a core aspect of the work. For helping during the installation, Open Space thanks Robert Youds’ team Bleda Baris, Elizabeth Charters, Ryan Hatfield, and Rachel Vanderzwet. Youds frequently consulted with his team, and his respect and confidence in their observations was inspiring. At Open Space, technician Miles Giesbrecht, program coordinator Breanna Fabbro, administrative coordinator Regan Shrumm, and curatorial assistant Margaret “Greta“ Hamilton carried all aspects of the project with professional diligence and enthusiasm. Graphic designer Leah McInnis helped us with the marketing materials. Producing this publication involved extensive contributions by photographer Tara Nicholson; videographer Naomi Kennedy; essayists Lisa Baldissera, Diana Freundl, and Regan Shrumm; editor and designer Sophie Pouyanne; and executive director Kegan McFadden. Robert Youds and his partner, Christine Toller, assisted with visuals, graphic design, and editing, and advised on this publication throughout, in countless ways.

Open Space is grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council, the Arts Development Fund of the Capital Regional District, BC Community Gaming Grants, Young Canada Works, and the Victoria Foundation, as well as our members, board of directors, and volunteers.

We recognize that the work of Open Space is carried out on unceded First Nations territories. The City of Victoria and surrounding CRD municipalities lie on the territories of the Lekwungen and Coast Salish peoples, including the Esquimalt, Songhees, and WSÁNEĆ First Nations. We are fortunate and grateful to live, work, think, and create on these lands.